Part I, The Thinking · Chapter 3

The Two Pilots

Prize draw, cashback or gift with purchase: who each one is really for

One trip, a hundred gift cards

From 13 July to 24 August 2026, anyone who bought a bottle of Grant Burge from an independent bottle shop could keep the receipt and enter to win a trip for two to the AFL Grand Final, valued at up to $23,284. There was one of those. Underneath it sat a hundred fifty-dollar gift cards for the AFL store, one minor prize per person, drawn from the same pool of entries. That is the whole structure, and it is worth looking at for a moment, because it is doing two different things to two different people at once and pretending to be one offer.

The trip is for the person who, standing in the shop on a Thursday, lets themselves imagine the last Saturday in September. The gift cards are for the person standing next to them who has already worked out that one in a very large number is not a plan, and would like to know what the real chances are. Both of them are in the aisle. Quite often they are the same person, on different days of the same week.

Grant Burge ran the Grand Final idea through four channels that year, as four separate promotions, and because each one published its terms you can do something that is rarely possible: set the same idea, in the same few weeks, beside itself at different prize budgets. The BWS version published a total prize pool of $126,550. The Liquorland version published $24,150, about a fifth of it. How many people entered each is not public, and where it sits in our records it is the client’s to publish, not ours. But the question the two pools pose is the right one, and it is the one this chapter is about: would five times the prize money bring five times the shoppers? In our experience it rarely comes close, and the reason is in the aisle, not in the prize table.

Channels are not comparable footprints, and any comparison between them has to say so: BWS has many more doors than Liquorland, and either has more than a network of pubs, so some of any gap is distribution doing the work, not persuasion. That reinforces the point rather than softening it. If distribution does the heavy lifting, the prize pool does not. And the prize pool is the thing the planning meeting spends longest arguing about, because it is the easiest number in the room to have an opinion on and the hardest to be wrong about in public.

So the chapter is about the two people in the aisle, what each of them is actually buying when they enter, and why the number the meeting argues over is rarely the one either of them reads.

Prize draw or cashback: hope and greed

Years of watching entry data arrive from two kinds of mechanic left us with a picture that has stuck. Put a prize draw and a cashback side by side at the same value, in the same category, on the same shelf, and they ask completely different things of the person looking at them. One says: buy this, and you might win something out of proportion to what you paid. The other says: buy this, send us the receipt, and we will give you thirty dollars back. Same budget. Different person being spoken to.

We call them the two pilots, and in the office they are the Gambler and the Accountant. The Gambler wants a shot at something disproportionate, decided by luck rather than effort, and the feeling of being in with a chance is a large part of what they are buying. Instant wins, prize draws and sweepstakes are built for the Gambler. The Accountant wants a known return for a known action, something they could explain to the person they live with. Cashbacks, gifts with purchase, bundles and thresholds are built for the Accountant. Neither pilot is wrong and neither is more sophisticated than the other. They are different shoppers, or the same shopper depending on what else is riding on the week, and every mechanic we have ever built is an argument aimed at one of them.

The first thing to say about the Gambler is that they do not read odds. They feel them. One big prize reads as not me, never me, whatever the published probability turns out to be, and the entry numbers reflect the feeling rather than the arithmetic. We came to the Rule of Three the slow way, by watching the same budget perform differently depending on how it was shown: one prize reads as impossible, three reads as possible, a hundred reads as probable. It is a rule of thumb from running these, not a measured effect, and we hold it loosely. The academic work that comes closest, from the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, is about prize count rather than value, and it found that people deciding whether to enter a sweepstake largely cannot judge whether the number of prizes on offer is good or bad when they see it on its own. Within a normal range, more prizes did not make them feel luckier.

That sits awkwardly against our rule of thumb, and we would rather say so than pretend it does not. The way the two fit together is that the Gambler reads odds against a reference point, and only against one: a competing offer on the next shelf, a category habit, a visual that makes the count concrete, a grid of gift cards next to a single trip. Absent a reference point, the number is just a number. So the practical version of the Rule of Three was never put more prizes in the pool. It is make the odds legible, which is a different job, and only one of the two costs prize money.

There is a darker version of the same finding. For twelve years McDonald’s Monopoly in the United States had almost no legitimate big winners, because the security officer who transported the winning pieces was palming them and selling them on, and nobody noticed until an anonymous tip. Shoppers could not feel the difference between long odds and zero, because there is no difference to feel. We mention it not to be grim but because it is the cleanest demonstration there is that the Gambler is buying a feeling, and the feeling has to be designed.

The Accountant is calmer and not, it turns out, as unemotional as they sound. The research on cashback is clear that people do not file a rebate as their own money returned; they treat it as something closer to new money, and spend it differently, which is why a cashback can pull harder than a discount of the same value and why the Accountant’s certainty has a small dopamine hit of its own. Smaller than the Gambler’s, steadier, and real. What the Accountant will not forgive is being made to work for too little. That is the Insult Threshold from chapter 1 again: a two-dollar saving behind a receipt upload and an account is not a modest win, it is admin, and the Accountant answers admin by not bothering and remembering that they did not bother.

The third seat

For a long time we talked about the two pilots as if they covered everyone in the aisle, and the appliance floor in chapter 1 is what taught us they do not. Both pilots assume the shopper is buying for themselves: the Gambler is chasing a thrill they will feel, the Accountant is calculating a return they will receive. Put a gift buyer in the seat and neither pilot is flying. The person choosing a present on the Friday before Father’s Day is not chasing dopamine and is not doing sums for themselves. They are discharging an obligation under time pressure, and what they want is confidence that it will land well.

That shopper responds to anything that makes the gift look and feel like more than they paid, which is what a bonus gift does well, and which is also what every brand on the same floor discovers at the same time. The third seat explains the $200 problem better than either pilot can: the certainty mechanic took over appliances in July and August because it is right for the gift buyer, and a mechanic that is right for everybody stops selecting anybody. It also explains Petbarn’s cash and Mattel’s ballet tickets. Neither was aimed at the pilot you would expect. Both were aimed at the person holding the wallet, who was buying for somebody else.

The Dopamine Sandwich: how to structure a prize pool

Back to the trip and the hundred gift cards, because that structure has a name in our shop and it is the answer to the question a lot of briefs are really asking: can we have both? One or two large, low-probability prizes for the Gambler, wrapped around a much larger tier of small, high-probability prizes for the Accountant. We call it the Dopamine Sandwich. The big prize does the recruiting. The tier underneath is what makes the odds feel worth the entry once the shopper is actually standing at the shelf doing the maths, because both numbers are sitting in the same pool and the shopper can see that their real chance is at the gift card, not the trip.

Two things make it work and both are easy to get wrong. First, it is one mechanic with one entry and one job. The tiering is inside the prize pool, not inside the promotion. Running a cashback and a sweepstake side by side and hoping the shopper picks a lane is not a sandwich, it is two promotions sharing a pack. Second, the boring tier has to be fought for. A trip to the Grand Final makes a better slide than a grid of fifty-dollar vouchers, and it is the image that gets a promotion approved by a category manager looking at a deck rather than living inside the entry data afterwards. That is a fair reason to lead with the big prize. It is not a reason to let the Accountant’s tier get cut late, as an afterthought, which is how we have watched it go more often than we have watched it go on purpose.

And there is a way the sandwich gets used as cover for not deciding. If the headline prize is doing trial, the participation tier is doing data and the entry mechanic is doing loyalty, that is not a sandwich. That is three campaigns in a trench coat, and it shows up later as a promotion nobody can explain simply to a retailer or a compliance reviewer. Chapter 2 applies: one job leads, the tiers serve it, and the two pilots are two ways of selling the same thing to the same aisle.

There is a quieter reason to like the shape, and it is legal rather than psychological. A law passed by the federal parliament in August 2026, the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Act, narrows the exemption that lets trade promotions run draws without being treated as gambling, from 1 January 2027 (chapter 16 has the detail). Its target is the business where the customer is really paying for a chance, a subscription or membership fee that exists mainly to fund recurring draws for big prizes, and not the ordinary buy-the-product-get-an-entry promotion. But the further a promotion leans towards pure Gambler appeal, low odds, high value, thin connection to a purchase, the closer it sits to a line regulators are actively redrawing. A pool that is mostly a large tier of achievable, purchase-linked rewards with a few aspirational prizes on top reads unambiguously as a trade promotion. A pool that is one enormous low-odds prize is starting to look like the thing the bill is trying to separate out. Worth knowing at the design stage rather than at legal review.

What the public numbers say

We hold far more detailed numbers about prize draws and cashbacks than appear here, entries and claims from promotions we have run and fulfilled, and none of them is in this book. They are our clients’ promotions and our clients’ customers. What can be said in public comes from the promotions themselves and from the people who count them.

Promo-Monitor, an independent tracker of Australian promotions, counted liquor store promotions from 2022 to 2025, and its figures put both pilots on the same chart. In 2025, 65.2 per cent of the promotions it found were a chance to win, built for the Gambler. About a quarter offered a certain or immediate reward, built for the Accountant. And the share that did both in one promotion, an instant win with a major draw on top or a gift with purchase plus a chance to win, went from 3.4 per cent in 2022 to 9.4 per cent: the Dopamine Sandwich, nearly tripling in three years. The twelve suppliers the report treats as leaders had all used that combined design at least once; among the other 105 suppliers whose brands were promoted, 12.4 per cent had.

On the size of prize pools the spread is enormous. Of the 2025 promotions that published a pool, the median for an ordinary promotion was $10,000, and for one backed by prize insurance it was about $411,000, a story chapter 7 picks up. All of these are counts of promotions, not results. They say what brands chose, not what worked, and the report says as much about its own figures. They do settle one thing: in liquor the Gambler gets most of the attention, and the design that speaks to both pilots at once is growing from a small base.

Arguing that the pool is weak is only half an argument. In our experience the stronger levers are being in front of more shoppers, for the right length of time, and making the odds believable, rather than paying people more. That is experience, not a published finding, and it leans towards liquor and whitegoods, the categories we work in most.

Deciding which pilot you are flying for

None of this replaces the sum from chapter 1. The three-second equation still decides whether the offer is worth the shopper’s attention at all, and the Insult Threshold still applies if the certain prize in the Accountant’s tier is too small to be worth claiming. What the two pilots add is an earlier and cheaper question, one that should be asked before anyone argues about prize values: which pilot is this promotion actually flying for, and is it the same pilot the last three flew for? A brand that has run five instant wins in a row has been talking to the Gambler for a year and has not said a word to the Accountant. That is not a mechanic problem. It is a strategy gap, and it usually belongs to the brand that never asks whether the last promotion worked or just felt exciting to launch.

The implication for the brief is uncomfortable and useful. If the pool were halved and the difference spent on being in more doors, letting people come back, and making the odds believable, would more bottles leave the shelf or fewer? In our experience, more shoppers would act, and in a promotion that needs a purchase to enter, more shoppers acting is more sales. Whether those sales are extra, rather than ones that would have happened anyway, is the client’s sell-out data to answer, and it is worth asking for before the next pool is set. The question is almost never asked, because the prize pool is the easiest part of a promotion to argue about, and nobody has ever been blamed for a prize that was too big.

Which brings us to the term in the sum that everyone wants to shrink and nobody wants to understand. The next chapter is about friction, and about the day we discovered it was the thing paying for the generosity.